The Water Is Wide: A Memoir

Pat has a meeting with the Southern School Superintendent, Dr. Henry Piedmont, during which he says that he wants to teach on Yamacraw Island. Piedmont hails Pat as “a godsend” because he has “prayed at night […] for an answer to the problems of Yamacraw Island” and for someone “to teach those poor colored children” (11).

Yamacraw is an island off the South Carolina mainland. It is “beautiful because man has not yet had the time to destroy this beauty” (13). The population is primarily black people who make their living from the sea and small farms, although some white families “live on the island in a paternalistic, but in many ways symbiotic relationship with their neighbors” (13).

According to the author, the “twentieth century has largely ignored the presence of Yamacraw” (13). He describes the people as having changed very little since the Emancipation Proclamation: “Indeed, many of them have never heard of this proclamation” (14). However, life on the island is changing, and young people are leaving the island at an alarming rate. The author observes that the “island is dying and the people know it” (14).

Much of the change on the island is due to a new industrial factory on the mainland.